I’m tempted to undertake a 1970s TV movie marathon. Much of that “movie of the week” stuff was better than what could be found in movie theaters. Duel, Night Stalker, Brian’s Song. I also want to rewatch the one with Andy Griffith as the bad guy: Pray for the Wildcats to see if it holds up to when I saw it when I was 11.
Maybe it’s a reflection of my age, but TV movies from other decades don’t seem nearly as memorable as those from the Seventies.
Just watched The Elephant Man, which has been on my list forever so with the recent passing of David Lynch I got it. Very good movie. I remember when it came out originally and I think we wanted to see it, so my father went and saw it. He said it was probably too depressing for us and in hindsight, I think he was right.
I got rid of cable a long time ago, so when I’m not zipping through YouTube, I tend to slog through a lot of movies. I’ve watched a few classics in the last week or so. Among them:
The Taking of Pellham One Two Three (1974) - Robert Shaw, Walter Matthau - gritty, vulgar, realistic, flawed, kind of a downer when you get right down to it. All the bad guys are really bad, except for the one guy who lives who’s just pathetic. But here’s the thing … people sneeze. That was a stupid thing to hang the hook on (the detectives realize they got the right guy because one of the hijackers sneezed too).
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) - John Carpenter joint. I thought I knew something about this movie, but I really didn’t. For some reason I thought it was set in NYC not LA. And it’s basically a zombie / western flick. The whole defending the last outpost - and the gang assaulting the precinct never speak and never stop. I liked it more than I thought I would, beyond the novelty factor of it, that is.
The Shootist (1976) - John Wayne, Ron Howard, Lauren Bacall, Jimmy Stewart (briefly). I’m not really a huge John Wayne fan. I’ve tolerated him in most of his movies, but he actually acts in this one … here and there, I mean, but there are glimmers of talent. I was more impressed with Ron Howard’s performance.
I agree, though I think maybe we are supposed to think…ah, just to make sure he’ll go back in and search a bit more thorough. The bad guy had put the money(?) in the oven, so it would now be found.
The Fugitive 1993 Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones
On Sundance channel
Casting Harrison Ford is perfect. He always has a hounded and tired expression in his later films. Great job
Tommy Lee is extremely skilled at playing cops and authority figures.
There have been plans for a remake. I think it would be a mistake. The original has aged well. Nothing in it is dated.
I just watched, for at least the dozenth time, Chariots of Fire. It’s in the top ten of the hundreds of movies I’ve seen. And it’'s mostly true to the real events, although a couple of liberties were taken. That’s in the nature of movies.
I was so sorry to learn of the death of Ian Charleson, only a few years after the movie.
I won a newspaper contest when I picked this for Best Picture winner. And I think Ian Holm was robbed of winning Best Supporting Actor, it went to Sir John Gielgud, in the same picture, who spent very little time on screen.
When this movie was made one of the characters portrayed, Jackson Schulz, was still alive and I saw him on television spots about the film. The scene where he passed a note to Eric Liddell before the 400m race was real.
Coincidentally, this was just on TCM last night (part of their “30 Days of Oscar” programming). Prompted by your post, we watched it - the first time I’d seen it since its initial release. Excellent movie.
Sir John Gielgud did win the Oscar that year, but he won it for his role in Arthur (“I’ll alert the media”) not for his role in Chariots.
This. They had narrowed the search down to a handful of suspects (former subway drivers). The sneeze just gave Garber a reason to look harder at him.
Oops. You are right, and the Arthur role was great. But I still preferred Holm.
One thing that set the movie in time for me was when Harold mentioned his age, 24. That would have made him exactly the age of my grandfather. Those young men could have been my grandfather, if they had been young automechanics from Kansas. The 1924 games also had two Americans with famous names, Weismuller and Patton.
As I said I was pleased for this movie to win. No sex, no violence, not a single swear word.
Just watched on DVD, THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, starring Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland.
I’ve always enjoyed the GTR, and my (perhaps faulty) recollection is that stayed fairly close to the book.
He’s listed in the credits as a resource, along with Liddell’s sister. The principals would have all been in their early 80’s when the film was made, so I was surprised, but shouldn’t have been.
Also in the credits: Executive Producer Dodi Fayed…which jumped out to me after watching The Crown.
It was an interesting plot choice to focus on these 2 very different but very driven athletes – their paths actually just cross once in the film, when Liddell smoked Abrahams in the 100m, which prompted Abrahams to hire a coach.
Don’t Look Up
An impressive cast and an intriguing premise, but it never quite maximizes its potential. The film leans into dark satire but doesn’t push hard enough—its humor could be sharper, its sarcasm more cutting, and its dialogue more punchy. Inconsistencies in character motivations slow the momentum, making certain plot developments feel forced. Despite these shortcomings, it’s engaging, humorous, and delivers a relevant message, even if it falls a little shy of the scathing critique it seems to be aiming for.
Don’t miss the end-of-credit clips—the payoff is worth the wait.
I found Pray for the Wildcats on YouTube and Andy Griffith is phenomenal as the evil, violent, rapey CEO on a dirt bike trek through Baja California with three ad men trying to get his account. William Shatner plays the damaged moral compass in the film; while the timid Robert Reed and ambitious Majoe Gortner enable the Griffith character’s dark side.
I thought I knew how this film ended but I had it conflated with another TV movie Griffith made in 1974 called Savages where he played another bad guy in the desert trying to cover up his misdeeds. His co-star in that is Sam Bottoms (Lance from Apocalypse Now). That’s also available on YouTube.
I will actually say that the lamest part of the(very good!) movie is that we had to have the “maybe we should just let them all die for the sake of the subway traffic” guy. I mean, come on.
Fun movie, though.
Really? Let them keep the train, there are plenty of them!
Another “Duke” guy too.
Duke Kahanamoku easily qualified for the U.S. Olympic swimming team in 1912. At the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, he won a gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle, and a silver medal with the second-place U.S. team in the men’s 4×200-meter freestyle relay.
During the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Kahanamoku won gold medals in both the 100 meters (bettering fellow Hawaiian Pua Kealoha) and in the relay. He finished the 100 meters with a silver medal during the 1924 Olympics in Paris, with the gold going to Johnny Weissmuller and the bronze to Kahanamoku’s brother, Samuel. By then age 34, Kahanamoku won no more Olympic medals.[1] But he served as an alternate for the U.S. water polo team at the 1932 Summer Olympics.
I’m a big fan of silent movies. I recently watched half of the 1924 Douglas Fairbanks Thief of Bagdad (with the Carl Davis orchestral score, derived from Rimsky-Korsikov) and the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera. One usually sees the 1929 re-release, because it’s of much higher quality, and it contains the early Technicolor sequences (and, in the Criterion edition, the Hanschliegl color sequence on the rooftop, as well). The 1029 release was with partial sound, ad they put a different actress as Carlotta, making Virginia Pearson, the original Carlotta into “Carlotta’s mother” so that she had an excuse to storm angrily into the Opera manager’s office. The intertitles and some still shots of manuscripts are different between the two versions.
I just watched on DVD, THE ABOMINIBLE DOCTOR PHIBES, starring Vincent Price.
Ray Bradbury wrote the screenplay.